博物馆优先吸引外国游客还是服务本地Should Museums Serve Tourists or Local People?

Most museums manage to serve both tourists and local people without much trouble. The two aims do pull apart at the edges, however, over what is collected, how it is displayed and what it costs to enter. Where they do conflict, I believe the local audience should come first. The argument for designing around visitors is mainly financial, and it is not a weak one. International tourists pay entrance fees, buy things in the shop and eat in the cafe. In many museums that income is what pays for the conservation work, the archive and the free schools programme. A museum that ignored visitors completely might be admirable in principle and unable to open on Mondays. There is also a fair argument that a country's major collections are part of how it presents itself to the world. The argument for the local audience is less about money and more about what a museum is for. A place designed for people passing through once will drift towards the famous, the photogenic and the easily explained, because that is what a single short visit rewards. A museum built for people who might return twenty times has to be deeper than that. It has to keep material of local importance that no tourist has heard of, change its displays, and expect its visitors to know something already. My own test is a simple one. Who is the museum for on a wet Tuesday in February, when there are no tourists at all? An institution with no good answer to that has become an attraction rather than a museum. In the end the two aims are not really opposed. Museums that take their own communities seriously tend to be exactly the ones that visitors travel a long way to see.